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UPDATED: Feb. 17, 2021 at 11:53 a.m.

Kyle Bass loves language. This should come as no surprise to anyone who knows him as the associate artistic director of Syracuse Stage or to all of the students Bass has taught playwriting to.

His role at Syracuse Stage allows him to be both a playwright and an artistic leader who helps shape the future of the theater’s trajectory. He chooses plays for the company to perform, curates Syracuse Stage’s festival “Cold Read” and pushes for the organization to premiere new works.

Bass has taught at Syracuse University, Goddard College, Hobart and William Smith College and Colgate University, where Bass is now an assistant professor. As an educator, he is dedicated to teaching a brand of playwriting that he said is being lost in today’s Netflix and television-obsessed culture. He pushes his students to write work that “scares” them.

As an artist, he is especially aware of theater companies rushing plays to production before they’re ready, a trend that does no one justice, Bass said. But if someone asks Bass, he’ll tell them that the idea of playwriting, as a craft and as a profession, wasn’t always so obvious to him.

“It doesn’t always start where you end up,” he said. “Whatever the ‘art bug’ is, though, I think it’s a gene — I think it’s a gene that makes us susceptible to the bug.”

Bass remembered music as a “kind of language” when he was a child. One where rhythm and sound expressed meaning through wordless communication. Bass experimented with words, too, mostly writing his thoughts throughout the day in a makeshift notebook, which he called “My Book of Sayings,” and assembled out of construction paper and staples.

But it wasn’t until his mother, an antique dealer, brought home an Underwood ‘40s typewriter that Bass realized the power of words in print. And while the black typewriter was his instrument of language, he practiced a musical one, too: the piano.

“It was one keyboard for another,” he said.

Bass eventually committed to writing and set out to study English at the SUNY Fredonia. In college, Bass was drawn to people in theater, and when a friend of his was performing in a production of Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler,” Bass attended the show and was mesmerized by it.

“I cannot believe what I am hearing,” Bass said about the title character, who is famous in the drama for her independence and modern feminist ideas. “I cannot believe that somebody imagined her.”

He watched theater as a kid back in Frankfort, New York, but it wasn’t until the Ibsen show that he got excited about it. That same enthusiasm would eventually land him a job at Syracuse Stage in the early ‘90s, where he worked for the organization’s marketing department.

He left Syracuse Stage for a higher-paying job at a pharmaceutical company, but he never stopped scribbling –– writing handwritten scenes and monologues on the back of every paper on his desk. Eventually, Bass found a Syracuse playwriting group called The Armory Square Playwrights, which read his work and immediately scheduled a reading.

Watching the audience sit in rapt attention during his first public reading inspired him to quit his job to attend Goddard University, earning a Master in Fine Arts in playwriting and eventually teaching in the program for 15 years.

In the early 2000s, Bass returned to Syracuse Stage as the public relations manager until, eventually, artistic director Robert Hupp asked him to serve as his associate artistic director. Hupp said that Bass’ generosity as an artist makes him not only an excellent collaborator but also a great friend.

“Even though it’s not his job title, we have a resident playwright,” Hupp said. “We’re very fortunate to have a resident playwright like Kyle, whose work I am proud to help produce. To the artistic life of Syracuse Stage, my relationship with Kyle is key.”

Bass left Syracuse Stage in 1996 for a job at a pharmaceutical company, only to rejoin the theater organization again back in the early 2000s. Young-Bin Lee | Staff Photographer

Bass’ success at Syracuse Stage stems from understanding what local audiences want to see, and then producing sincere plays that resonate, Hupp said. One such example is his play “Possessing Harriet,” which dramatizes Harriet Powell’s work as an abolitionist in central New York.

His next play, “salt/city/blues,” which was rescheduled for summer 2022 because of COVID-19, demonstrates Bass’ dedication to the city of Syracuse and its people, Hupp said. Set in a fictionalized version of Syracuse, it also returns Bass to his musical roots — the blues are essential to the characters’ lives and to the story.

Bass’ sense of care and commitment extends into the classroom. Former student Liam Lonegan, who graduated from SU in 2017, said that the lessons learned from Bass’ playwriting class are invaluable. Although he’s not a writer by trade –– Lonegan now serves as assistant artistic director at Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut –– Bass’ teachings continue to inform the work he does.

Since Bass and Lonegan have similar roles in their respective theaters, Lonegan said he’s regularly in contact with Bass and now considers him a colleague, not just a teacher.

“Being an artist and being an educator are very different things,” Lonegan said. “He knew I wasn’t going to be a playwright, but he’s able to understand and master the balance of being an artist himself and seeing where you are on your path. (He gives) you the skills to be just a little bit better.”

Besides teaching students such as Lonegan, Bass has also stacked a resume that includes screenplays and collaboration with visual artist Carrie Mae Weems. Bass joked that he may even write a memoir one day.

But even with experimentation, Bass remains dedicated to the classics. He considers his work to be “old school,” inspired by classic American playwrights like Arthur Miller and August Wilson.

Bass also reminds himself of his poetry roots through the “little hothouses” –– poetry books –– he keeps on his shelves. Before he was struck by the “Hedda Gabler” performance in college, a teenage Bass wanted to become a poet. Now, the playwright sometimes pulls them out from their shelf and sees how he can use the evocative language in his own work.

“I like subtext. I love actors. I really, really do,” Bass said. “And, that’s my theatricality.”

CORRECTION: A previous version of this post misstated the name of Goddard College. The Daily Orange regrets this error.

Published on February 16, 2021 at 11:17 pm